One in Three by Adam Wishart

Author:Adam Wishart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2007-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

In 1986, Penny Brohn and Pat Pilkington invited a group of scientists to the Bristol Cancer Help Centre to discuss the possibility of doing a scientific study that they hoped would prove the success of the Bristol Approach in treating cancer patients.

Sir Walter Bodmer, the director general of Britain’s largest cancer charity, the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF), and a renowned statistician, made the journey. As did Professor Tim McElwain from the Institute of Cancer Research in London—even though he had been one of the Bristol Centre’s most trenchant critics. The week before Prince Charles had visited the center, for instance, McElwain had complained to the Times that “royalty should not be endorsing bogus techniques.” He strongly disagreed with the claims that the hodgepodge of medicines, diets, and supplements could extend the lives of patients, stating in a television discussion of the center, “I have seen no evidence that it works.”

McElwain was not, however, a blinkered, uncompassionate doctor of the old school, and he shared Brohn and Pilkington’s view of the way some doctors treated patients. “I think [the Bristol Centre] highlights … our failure as doctors particularly in our relationship with our patients,” he said in the same television discussion. “This recurrent theme that patients are not involved in their own treatment, that they are improperly informed, that not enough time is taken with them and that there is often a lack of respect for them, by some doctors, though by no means all, is the thing that is important.” To this end, in 1984, he had become the vice chair of the newly formed British Association of Cancer United Patients (BACUP), which was to provide advice and emotional support to patients. The need was clearly there, as during the first year BACUP received thirty thousand phone calls.

Shortly after the visit of Bodmer and McElwain, the Imperial Cancer Research Fund agreed to pay for a small study. “This means that in a few years’ time,” trilled Penny Brohn when the study was under way, “we should be able to produce the facts and the figures to support what we believe to be true, that time spent at Bristol can have a profound effect on the performance and survival of cancer patients.”

The research study was led by Claire Chilvers, a professor of epidemiology at the Institute of Cancer Research, with McElwain supplying the clinical expertise. Initially they had hoped to randomly allocate women who arrived at Bristol into two groups: those receiving the Bristol Programme and those receiving nothing. But Pilkington and Brohn thought it was unethical to refuse treatment to some patients; and since they had sought out Bristol they would be unlikely to forgo the treatment once they had arrived. So McElwain and Chilvers decided to follow a group of patients from Bristol and compare them to case histories of patients drawn from the files of two district hospitals.

Women arriving at Bristol during the summer of 1986 were each handed a detailed questionnaire about their state of mind,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.